3/25/06

Three Years On, Americans Ignore Pleas of Repression Even Worse than Saddam’s

Following a death-to-gays fatwa issued last October by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, death squads of the Badr Corps have been systematically targeting gay Iraqis for persecution and execution, gay Iraqis say. But when they ask for help and protection from U.S. occupying authorities in the Green Zone, the secure area officialdom has carved out within Baghdad, gays Iraqis are met with indifference and derision...

The Badr Corps is committed to the sexual cleansing of Iraq,"said Ali Hili, a 33-year-old gay Iraqi exile in London who, with some 30 other gay Iraqis who have fled to the United Kingdom, five months ago founded the Abu Nawas Group there to support persecuted gay Iraqis...

The well-armed Badr Corps is the military arm of the Iranian-backed Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the powerful Shia group that is the largest political formation in Iraq’s Shia community, and was headquartered in exile in Tehran until Saddam Hussein’s fall. The SCIRI’s Badr Corps is trained and commanded by former Iraqi army officers.

The Ayatollah Sistani, the 77-year-old Iranian-born cleric who is the supreme Shia authority in Iraq, is revered by SCIRI as its spiritual leader. His anti-gay fatwa—available on Sistani’s official Web site—says that “people involved” in homosexuality “should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

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I thought the Ayatllah Sistani was the "moderate" we were cheering on.

Well, I've said it before and I've said it again -- I have no dog in this fight -- being neither gay nor Muslim

BUT

when the choice must be made between the people who say "This is the way I live," and the people who say "This is the way YOU must live," there's no question that sides must be taken and no question which side is the right side to take.

"As long as men believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities."

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NB: Now that I have struck the big bad standing-up-for-freedom stance, I want to make it clear that there is a high probability the BS level of the above is extremely deep (doesn't diminish the validity of Voltaire's comment one bit, just shows it's not limited to the Bad Boy Badr Corps) --

This from Juan Cole, a source more reliable than most (such as Gay City News, The Wall Street Journal, WashingBrain Times and The New York Times:

"The implication given by exiled gay Iraqi, Ali Hili, of the London-based gay human rights group OutRage, that Sistani has called for vigilante killings of gays, is untrue, though it is accurate that Sistani advises that the state make homosexual activity a capital crime.."